What does Atapa® offer that regression analysis and other traditional media mix modelling techniques don’t?

The interplay and effectiveness of different media channels over time can be difficult to understand with traditional top-down approaches such as regression analysis. Atapa® solves the problem by simulating every day of the campaign at the level of the consumer, i.e. in a bottom-up manner, before presenting its results. This also allows it to model the word of mouth effect.

Furthermore rather than looking backwards in the way traditional, media mix modelling operates it looks forwards into the future. It helps you understand why you got the results you got rather than simply what happened. You can then use that knowledge to simulate different scenarios on an ongoing basis instead of just once a year. The alternative is to use the same old media plan and hope the environment you’re operating in hasn’t changed, or else conduct slow and expensive live media mix change testing.

How does Atapa® work?

Atapa® uses an agent-based modelling approach to allow a marketing planner to simulate the effectiveness of different communications campaign scenarios on a virtual audience on an ongoing basis into the future. This bottom up approach divides the campaign audience into a collection of many agents, and observes the behaviour of the agents over time as they respond to different communication messages. Resulting awareness, word of mouth and sales levels are all modelled across different consumer groups.

This approach allows a precise understanding of your best media channels; what-if scenario predictions for different media spend decisions; and ROI optimization.

How do I know if Atapa® is working for my brand?

You can match the simulated sales output to a recent previous time period of actual sales results and media activity to see how well Atapa® is simulating your market reality.

How much data does Atapa® require?

Key data requirements are as follows:

Audience

Total audience

Audience segments %s

Purchasing cycle duration

Media Formats by Media Channels

Spend

CPM

Broadcast period

Historical Sales

Weekly or monthly sales figures

How long does it take to start running simulations with Atapa®?

This depends on how quickly media and sales information can be gathered. It usually takes between 4 to 12 weeks. The auto-calibration functionality of Atapa® speeds up the calibration part of the process considerably.

How fast is a simulation?

This depends on the size of your audience but a campaign targeted at a few million people will take around 5 minutes to run. Auto-calibration simulation runs take longer, at around 30 minutes.

What reports does Atapa® create?

Reports include:

Campaign report, describing cost of acquisition, contribution and ROI calculated on the basis of units sold as compared to the media (and production if available) spend. Awareness and other customer journey figures are also calculated.

Media Channels report, attributing sales to different media channels used over time along with the advertising pressure created and the supporting spend.

Word of mouth report, illustrating through data visualisation the campaign and its effect on word of mouth in action.

Can Atapa® analyse different flighting patterns?

Yes. You can either set up different versions of the same campaign and see the differing results or, within one version, input the different flighting inputs and enable or disable them as you see fit and view the results that way.

Can Atapa optimise spend across different consumer groups?

You will be able to see the effect of your spend on the different consumer groups and optimize accordingly. The data visualisation report we have even demonstrates this visually over time.

Can Atapa® run diminishing returns analyses?

Yes. A single report shows you the range of sales that could be achieved by increasing your media spend.

What communication channels can it handle?

From ‘unpaid’ communication channels like retail outlets, sales force, publicity and events to all online and offline communication channels.

How is Atapa® sold?

Atapa® is sold to Advertisers through Implementation Partner advertising agencies and consultancies who calibrate the model and run the simulations. Licenses are available by brand and territory on a monthly or yearly basis. Each license is valid up to 10 users.

How do I use Atapa® on my computer?

The graphical user interface of Atapa® installs as an Adobe Air application on your computer. The simulation engine is held in the cloud on our scaleable server platform. You save your campaigns and their simulation reports on a simple xml file that goes back and forward to our server in order to get reports from the simulation engine. You can export reports data to Excel.

How long has Atapa® been around?

We started operations in July 2008 and launched the first release of Atapa® in May 2009. Since then we’ve had our tyres kicked by the top econometricians of the world’s leading agencies and been fortunate enough to have supplied the likes of Pfizer with a predictive modelling capability.